Today, His Beatitude flies to Denver to sign the stimulus organ into law, a bill not one person who voted for it could possibly have read in its entirety, certainly not the one who is going to sign it into law.

On the other hand, maybe he doesn't really have to read it to know what's in it -- business give-aways to companies like General Electric and Vestas, among others (the Left's version of "big oil"). And it doesn't really matter what's in it. Appropriate bureaucrats will just make up for deficiencies by fiat, or Our Benevolent Leader will issue the executive order needed to patch up any missing elements. It would have been just as effective to write a one-page bill to the effect that the President is empowered to do, by fiat, whatever it takes to fix the economy, and whatever else Congressional Democrats and their Republican trophy wives determine he should be personally empowered to do.

After all, they love us and want only what's best for us; and what's best for us is whatever it is they decide to do.

After all the ghastly statism of the Bush years, you might think that the Left would back off from using power to achieve its aims. Instead, they have learned nothing. The Left has been lying in wait for its chance. As the Obama people entered the White House, it was as if they found a closet labeled "failed ideas of the past." They opened it and the contents spilled everywhere. They started grabbing things and putting them in the regulatory books and in legislation.

What an amazing pile of junky, worn-out, bogus policy ideas! Equal pay for equal work. Infrastructure spending. More money to the public schools. Socialized medicine. Rock-bottom interest rates. Welfare! Every wish granted by government. Down with business. Down with business failures. Curbs on fat-cat pay. Down with Wall Street. Turn on the money spigots. Expropriate the expropriators. Subsidies for every lifestyle that flies in the face of bourgeois prejudice.

[...]

Those Obamaites! So compassionate, loving, universally minded, progressive — except that their ideological cousins managed to starve and destroy whole civilizations. Loyalty to their creed means death, because their ideology is the pathway to the gulag — and for one simple reason: their preferred means of social change is the state. The state is always and everywhere a threat to liberty, and liberty is the basic building block of prosperity and civilization.

Despite the slogans about progress, the upshot of the Obama administration is as deeply reactionary as anything that Bush conjured up. Despite all the hype and hope, what Obama offers is nothing new. It amounts to the robber state and the regimentation of society, a plan that will kill off prosperity and the conditions that allow for it.

The Republicans are right to fight this tendency at every turn, for it represents a radical attack on all things truly American. Worse still, by playing with the printing presses, the policy tendency here is also deeply dangerous. It could destroy the dollar internationally and domestically, igniting a hyperinflation that no one will be able to control once it gets going. One only wishes that the Republicans had been so principled when their president was in charge! (Emphasis mine.)

Okay, Lew isn't a close friend -- not even an acquaintance; but he should be.